


Echoes Of Something Lost

by HalfshellVenus



Category: Prison Break
Genre: Community: 1character, Community: philosophy_20, Community: prisonbreak100, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-12
Updated: 2006-04-12
Packaged: 2019-03-17 06:24:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13653279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HalfshellVenus/pseuds/HalfshellVenus
Summary: Fifty sentences in the life of Lincoln Burrows





	Echoes Of Something Lost

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](https://1character.livejournal.com/profile)[1character](https://1character.livejournal.com/), where I claimed Lincoln Burrows for Prison Break. These use the “Gamma” table of prompts. Also written for [](https://prisonbreak100.livejournal.com/profile)[prisonbreak100](https://prisonbreak100.livejournal.com/), where I have the Gen pairing of Lincoln and Michael (for prompt [#65](https://www.livejournal.com/rsearch/?tags=%2365), “Passing”) and for [](https://philosophy-20.livejournal.com/profile)[philosophy_20](https://philosophy-20.livejournal.com/) where I have the Prison Break General Series (Prompt [#20](https://www.livejournal.com/rsearch/?tags=%2320), “Reflection”).

x-x-x-x-x

**Crown**  
The man who sold him his first dime bag had a gold tooth, and it gleamed behind Lincoln’s eyes later as he floated above his own body lying on the park bench down below.

 **Snow**  
White flurries in his childhood skies…the downfall of rich-kid buyers… the quiet vision of this last winter he will own; from innocence to destruction to death, it is a cycle born of the archetype of purity.

**Bandage**  
He can cover Michael’s scrapes and hug away his tears, but there isn’t enough of him—or anything else he can summon—that will fix or bind the wounds that gape across their orphaned lives.

**Child**  
He was still a child when he became his brother’s keeper, and he missed that lost childhood yet again when an unplanned baby caught him by surprise.

**Brick**  
These pieces mortared together with infinite skill could have held his future, but they gave way to their equivalents in hashish; his foundation, once so solid, became smoke and cloudy visions and drugged-out logic, and then overnight it was ash and then it was gone.

**Possession**  
It was bigger than the assault charges he’d served back in Juvie: possession was a serious crime with no excuses, and he’d be thrown in with the big boys for this one.

**Hands**  
Michael’s hands were shaped like long, elegant thoughts, but Lincoln’s were thick and powerful for taking on the work that needed to be done and for never, ever backing down.

**Freedom**  
He’d thought his circumstances had jailed him throughout his life, but locked down now in a Death Row cage of concrete and steel, he realizes that freedom is relative and he misses it now that it’s gone.

**Bell**  
More often than not he stayed with the stoners after the middle school lunch break had ended.

**Buttons**  
“You never let me do anything—I’m not a baby!” but “It’s my job to keep you safe, damnit!” and god, no matter how old they got, he and Michael still manage to set each other off.

**Collar**  
Bursting in through the door they came at him, angry, pistols ready, and then they had him cuffed and stumbling down the stairs for the one crime he’d thought about but hadn’t _done_.

**Pearl**  
Her skin was moonbeam soft and pale under his fingers, as they brushed a path his lips would find in time.

**Trouble**  
Veronica still loves him when she shouldn’t, and that he _lets_ her just proves he’s everything she ought to run from.

**Staircase**  
Climbing the route up to Michael’s apartment, he steels himself against the possibility that he will not be welcome.

**Trap**  
There’s a videotape with lies for all to see, and how can it bind him to a crime he didn’t commit?

**Powder**  
Big hands can’t help going too far; Lincoln’s first attempt at diapering LJ resulted in a white mountain covering little baby parts and a cloud of talcum that made both of them cough.

**Classified**  
His crime is a public record, but the scheme that set him up must be locked down as tight as treason or assassination or war.

**Circle**  
“Have a little faith,” he’d said, knowing that he would always take care of Michael, but now years later his words float back through his own despair and it’s his brother’s hand that keeps him from going to pieces.

**Glass**  
“I didn’t do it!” he cried out as his mother glared at the broken vase, and it was just one of so many lies he never got away with.

**Electricity**  
He could never get a permanent current of energy running through his body, and he broke laws and people trying to make it happen; how ironic now that he’ll finally get more than he can handle, and that it will break him forever in the process.

**Sleep**  
Lincoln soaked up Michael’s worries as he curled around his brother at night; it was such a relief to let them _go_ then as he slipped into the slumber that would let him forget.

**Little**  
His baby is the smallest person he’s ever known, and it is days before Lincoln stops being afraid to touch him.

**Cherry**  
He never really liked being anyone’s all-the-way first time (it was too hard being that _everything_ to someone else); so it was no surprise that he absolutely hated it when some guy who was nothing— _nothing_ —took that away from him in prison.

**Backwards**  
He couldn’t wait to live his own life his way—though what a mess he made of it—and yet in Fox River he found himself in sliding through stages in reverse from “Family is everything” to “I wish Michael was here” to finally wanting his mother in that darkest hour of Death.

**Library**  
He could never understand Michael’s fascination with the place—a world of books and the zombies who read them—when his own idea of a great time was too much all at once until it led to trouble.

**Closet**  
“Lincoln! Let me out of here!” Michael yelled, but Lincoln was already halfway across the house changing the channel from “Nova” to “The A-Team.”

**Nail**  
High school was _full_ of girls he wanted to chew up and spit out, and he’d made it through half of them by the time he dropped out just a year later.

**Prey**  
He wanted to pulverize Abruzzi for what he did to Michael, and god-- he might actually kill someone yet if T-Bag doesn’t stop running his eyes and his language over Michael’s innocent body.

**Contact**  
These fingers separated by plexi-glass long for the sensation that completes the circuit, and yet he can’t have it—is love actually real if you can’t ever touch it?

**Milk**  
“Not out of the carton!” his mother would yell, and in his head the words were still in her voice when he told Michael the exact same thing.  
  
**Definition**  
“What’s _abandoned_ mean?” Michael asked when he was five, and “Us” was what Lincoln thought but didn’t say.

**Star**  
Michael will become important one day, and Lincoln thinks nothing he does himself will ever matter as much as providing a way to make that happen.

**Mechanism**  
There are tunnels and his brother and sudden sickness in the Infirmary, and Lincoln wonders how in the Hell all of this can possibly add up to an escape plan?

**Loss**  
His gut clenches and his shoulders sag every time he thinks of her, but someone’s got to take care of Michael and it’s up to him to take her place—even though he knows he will never succeed.

**Fold**  
His spitfire of a girlfriend has a baby on the way now, and Lincoln had lost this hand before he even knew he was playing the game.

**Win**  
Lincoln races for a paycheck and Michael buys property and puts up hotels, and this is how his younger brother takes him in nearly every single Monopoly game they play.

**Ache**  
He hates the loneliness of his empty cell and the days that march toward death, but he can’t blame the Truth he never loved for not caring to save him now.

**Scab**  
His father left and he didn’t come back, and though the years roll by unchanged Lincoln keeps testing his knowledge of that to see if it still hurts.

**Ash**  
The weight of his world lifts as his first joint turns to ash; he has no way of knowing that his life will follow it in time, set in motion by this choice he made today.

**Rice**  
If anything could pass the time in prison, it was the lurid distraction of vampire novels; Michael would never approve, but then Michael wasn’t doing hard time with only dirt and bugs for company.

**Expectation**  
He should have been more, should have made something of himself; he can feel his brother and his mother’s spirit waiting for it, when honestly it was hard enough just making it through a single day.  
  
**Time**  
There is nothing left but this (and little of it now), this time in which he can worry and regret and know that none of it was ever enough.

**Music**  
He sang to Michael those awful nights after Mom had died, and he sang to LJ to watch his eyelids slow and close; there is no-one to sing his worries away when he needs it the most, and the finality of his cage mocks him with its silence.

**Paint**  
Even as they’re decorating the baby’s room, Lincoln knows the color on these walls will probably stay in this apartment longer than he does.

**Worn**  
Lisa no longer asks when he’ll be back, and she glares at him when he’s home; he’s pretty sure she’s had enough, and that it’s only a matter of time before she stops tolerating his failure.

**Grim**  
He will die here, leaving a brother and a child behind, while the murderers and monsters that surround him may have their chance to destroy again.

**Wild**  
“You’re out of control,” his teachers told him, like stopping it would make the chaos of the world seem any easier.

**Judgment**  
The words washed over him in a nightmare he could not escape: “You have been sentenced to Death,” and then the world as he knew it had ended.

**Last**  
“My final words are only for my family,” he tells the Warden, “because I can’t apologize for a crime I didn’t commit”; Lincoln sees the uneasy depths of Pope’s soul revealed then in a silent jumble of questions and powerlessness and regret.

**Finale**  
Would his mother be there, when all of it was over—would he finally have the chance to go home?

 

\----- fin -----  



End file.
